On 1/8/2013 10:55 AM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote: What version of VMS and how do you get back the NCP$_NETIO error? OpenVMS E8.4 on node RHESUS 8-JAN-2013 19:03:23.78 Uptime 8 04:55:33 If you get an actual text string back, you might try: "PIPE NCP TELL.... ; SHOW SYMBOL $STATUS" Oooh, that's nifty. I'll have to do that. I don't see why you can't just issue the NCL TELL from the command line just once to get the failure results. Because the failure is transient. It's not happening 100% of the time. -brian